A few months back, Donnelly reviewed Louk Markham’s book on Crown Coach Corporation, and we thought at least one of the images presented there was worth another look. While Crown was best known for its buses, it also pursued some prototype work through the years. One of those prototypes, the Wide-Trac built for Kaiser Industries in 1960, featured an all-aluminum body.

The caption in Markham’s book states that Kaiser had the Wide-Trac built for consideration by the U.S. Army, but we can’t find a mention of it at all in Crismon’s exhaustive book on U.S. Military Wheeled Vehicles. In addition, the two-tone paint and lettering on the cab suggest that this was built for civilian use; to go a little further, they also suggest Brooks Stevens may have had a hand in the Wide-Trac’s design (though we see no mention of it at all in Adamson’s “Industrial Strength Design”).

We also have to wonder if this might have been built on the Willys XM443 platform. That cab-forward four-wheel-drive design also used an all-aluminum body and was evaluated by the Army in the late 1950s. Perhaps Kaiser had a few of those left over from military testing and commissioned Stevens and Crown to whip up a little utility vehicle for use around Kaiser’s facilities?

UPDATE (2.August 2011): The ATHS’s What Am I forum recently highlighted the Wide-Trac and noted that it was a design submitted as part of the International Vehicle Investigation (IVI) program, which aimed to develop a low-cost vehicle for third-world countries.

I know it’s not in Crismon or Industrial Strength Design – great book, btw, but that has to be a Brooks Stevens design. The high-contrast two-tone, the way the roll bar is picked out and the overall feel say it’s his work. Plus he created a very similar look for a prototype Jeep FC-Series passenger van.

While this one is dressed up, the lack of compound body-work and the spartan features – note the sliding door windows for example – makes me wonder if this wasn’t commissioned to be a “developing world” utility vehicle like the Farmobil Chrysler wound up selling in Europe in the ’60s.

This is reminiscent of the Scania-Vabis FC-150AM military prototype of 1958-1959, based on the Kaiser Jeep FC-150A, but with a Swedish built body. Scania was the Swedish Willys importer. One unverified report claims that five examples were built. Supposedly one of these prototypes wound up in France to be tested for possible commercial production by Hotchkiss, while another went to Australia for the same reason. A survivor in Norway can be seen here (listed as a 1960 Kaiser Jeep FC-150AM) and here is an as yet unrestored example example in Sweden (scroll down to the blue truck in the snow).

It is conceivable that the Crown built Kaiser Wide-Trac could have been a civilian-market oriented design exercise based more on the angular FC-150AM than the rounded FC-150A.

In turn, styling elements of both the FC-150AM and the Kaiser Wide-Trac seem to have influenced the late 1960s-1970s Spanish built VIASA (Vehículos Industriales y Agrícolas, S.A.)Jeep SV series. These models were the the one-ton pickup ‘Campeador,’ the double cab pickup ‘Duplex,’ the one-ton van ‘Furgon,’ and the 9-seat van ‘Toledo.’ They could be ordered with either the ubiquitous Super Hurricane in-line six, or with a Perkins 4-cylinder diesel.